Chapter Six.
“Nonsense, man!” cried Captain Applegarth. “Don’t make such an ass of yourself! Flying Dutchman indeed! Why, that cock and bull yarn was exploded years ago, and I didn’t think there was a sailor afloat in the present day ass enough to believe in this story!”
“I may be a hass, sir; I know I am sometimes,” retorted old Masters, evidently aggrieved by the skipper speaking to him like this before the men. “But, sir, seein’ is believin’. There’s this ship an’ there’s that there craft a-sailin’ alongside in the teeth o’ the gale. Hass or no hass, I sees that, captain!”
“Hang it all, man, can’t you see that it is only the mirage or reflection of our own vessel, produced by the light of the meteor throwing her shadow on to the mass of cloud leeward? Look, there are our two old sticks and the funnels between, with the smoke rushing out of them! Aye, and there, too, you can see this very bridge here we’re standing on, and all of us, as large as life. Why, bo’sun, you can see your own ugly mug reflected now opposite us, just as it would be in a looking glass. Look, man!”
“Aye, I sees, sir, plain enuff, though I’m a hass,” said Masters at length. “But it ain’t nat’rel, sir, anyhow; an’ I misdoubts sich skeary things. I ain’t been to sea forty years for nothin’, Captain Applegarth, an’ I fears sich a sight as that betokens some danger ahead as ’ill happen to us some time or other this voyage. Even started on a Friday, sir, as you knows on, sir!”
“Rubbish!” cried the skipper, angry at his obstinacy. “See, the mirage has disappeared now that the meteor light has become dispersed. Look smart there, aloft, and furl that topsail! It’s just seven bells and I’m going to ease down the engines and bear up on our course again. Up with you, men, and lay out on the yard!”
The hands who had stopped half-way up the fore-rigging, spell-bound at the sight of the mirage, now bestirred themselves, shaking off their superstitious fears; old Masters, in the presence of something to be done, also working, and soon the sail was furled, the bunt stowed, and the gaskets passed.
“It’s no use our keeping on any longer after that ship of yours, Haldane,” observed the skipper, turning to me when the men had all come in from the topsail yard and scrambled down on deck again after making everything snug aloft. “If she were still afloat we must have overhauled her before this. I really think, youngster, she must have been only a sort of will-o’-the-wisp, like that we saw just now—an optical illusion, as I told you at the time, recollect, caused by some cross light from the afterglow of the sunset thrown upon the white mist which we noticed subsequently rising off the water. Eh, my boy?”
“Ah, no, captain,” I replied earnestly. “The ship I saw presented a very different appearance to that reflection of ours! She was full-rigged, I told you, sir, and though her canvas was torn and she looked a bit knocked about in the matter of her tophamper, she was as unlike our old Star of the North as a sailing vessel is unlike a steamer!”
“She might have been a derelict.”
“I saw a girl on her deck aft, sir, with a dog beside her, as distinctly as I see you, sir, now!”
“Well, well, be that as it may, my lad, though I’m very sorry for the poor young thing, if she is still in the land of the living, I can’t carry on like this for ever! If she were anywhere in sight it would be quite another matter; but, as it is, not knowing whether we’re on her right track or not, we might scud on to the Equator without running across her again. No, no; it wouldn’t be fair to the owners or to ourselves, indeed, to risk the ship as well as the lives of all on board by continuing any longer on such a wild-goose chase.”
“Very good, sir,” said I, on his pausing here, as if waiting for me to say something. “We’ve tried our best to come up with her, at any rate.”
“We have that, and I daresay a good many would call us foolhardy for carrying on as we’ve done so long. However, I’m going to abandon the chase now and bear up again on our proper course, my boy, and the devil of a job that will be, I know, in the teeth of this gale!”
So saying, the skipper, grasping the handle of the engine-room telegraph, which led up through a tube at the end of the bridge, signalled to those in charge below to slow down to half speed.
“Down with the helm, quartermaster!” he cried to the man at the wheel, and, at the same moment holding up his hand to attract the attention of old Masters, who had returned to his station on the fo’c’s’le, greatly exercised in his mind by what had recently occurred, he sang out in a voice of thunder that reached the knightheads and made the boatswain skip: “Haul in your jib sheet and flatten those staysails sharp! I want to bring her round to the wind handsomely, to prevent taking in another of those green seas aboard when we get broadside-on. Look smart, bo’sun, and keep your eye on her. Keep your eye on her, d’you hear? It’s ticklish work, you know. Look-out sharp or she’ll broach to!”
Far as the eye could reach, the storm-tossed surface of the deep was white with foam, white as a snowfield, and boiling with rage and fury.
The bank of blue-black cloud that had rested along the horizon to leeward had now melted away in some mysterious fashion or other, and the sky became as clear as a bell, only some wind-driven scrap of semi-transparent white vapour sweeping occasionally across the face of the pale, sickly-looking moon that looked down on the weird scene in a sort of menacing way; while, in lieu of the two or three odd sentinels that had previously peeped out from the firmament, all the galaxies of heaven were, at this moment, in their myriads above, spangling the empyrean from zenith to pole.
But the gale!
While running before the wind, the wind, although it had ballooned our sails out to bursting point, brushing us along at a wild, mad-cap rate, and buffeting the boisterous billows on either hand, scooping them up from the depths of the ocean and piling them in immense waves of angry water that rolled after us, striving to overwhelm us, we could hardly, even while taking advantage of it, appreciate its awful and tremendous force.
On coming about, however, and facing it, the case was vastly different, the wind increasing tenfold in its intensity.
Where it had sung through the rigging it now shrieked and howled, as if the air were peopled with demons, while the waves, lashed into fury, dashed against our bows like battering rams, rising almost to the level of our masthead where their towering crests met overhead.
Round came the old barquey’s head slowly, and more slowly still as she staggered against the heavy sea, until, all at once, she stopped in stays, unable apparently, though struggling all she could, to face her remorseless foe.
“Luff up, quartermaster!” roared the skipper to the top of his voice and dancing up and down the bridge in his excitement. “Luff, you beggar, luff!”
“I can’t, sir,” yelled the man in desperation—a fresh hand who had come on duty to relieve Atkins at six bells. “The steam steering gear has broken-down, sir, and I can’t make her move.”
“By Jingo, that’s a bad job,” cried the skipper, but he was not long at a nonplus. “Run aft, Haldane, and you too, Spokeshave. Loosen the bunt of the mizzen-trysail and haul at the clew. That’ll bring her up to the wind fast enough, if the sail only stands it!”
To hear was to obey, and both Spokeshave and I scuttled down the bridge-ladder as quickly as we could and away along the waist of the ship aft, the urgency of our errand hastening our movements if we had needed any spur beyond the skipper’s sharp, imperative mandate.
But, speedily as we had hurried, on mounting the poop-ladder and rushing towards the bitts at the foot of the mizzenmast to cast off the bunt-lines and clewlines of the trysail we found we had been already forestalled by an earlier arrival on the scene of action.
This was Mr O’Neil, the second officer, whom I had left below asleep in his cabin when I came up at two bells from the saloon, he having been on duty all the afternoon and his services not being required again until night, when he would have to go on the bridge to take the first watch from eight to midnight.
Feeling the bucketing-about we were having in the trough of the sea when we came about, and probably awakened by the change of motion, just as a miller is supposed to be instantaneously roused by his mill stopping, though he may be able to sleep through all the noise of its grinding when at work, Garry O’Neil had at once shoved himself into his boots and monkey jacket and rushed up on the poop through the companion and booby-hatch that led up directly on deck from the saloon.
Arrived here, he had evidently noted the vessel’s insecurity, and, seamanlike, had hit upon the very same way out of the difficulty that had suggested itself to the skipper, having, ere we reached his side, cast off the ropes confining the folds of the trysail and trying singlehanded to haul out the clew.
“Begorrah, me bhoys, ye’ve come in the very nick o’ time!” he exclaimed on seeing us. “Here, Spoke, me darlint, hang on to the end of this sheet and you, Dick, step on to the tail of it, whilst I take a turn of the slack round that bollard! Faith, it’s blo’in’ like the dievle, and we’ll have our work cut out for us, me bhoys, to git a purchase on it anyhow. Now, all together, yo-heave-ho! Pull baker, pull dievle!”
With that, bending our backs to it, we all hauled away at the sheet, succeeding by a great endeavour in stretching the clew of the sail to the end of the boom, which we then secured amidships as best we could, though the spar and sail combined jerked to such an extent that it seemed as if the mizzenmast would be wrenched out of the ship each instant, the heavy fold of the canvas that hung loosely under the jaws of the gaff shaking and banging about with a noise like thunder.
Even the small amount of canvas exposed to the wind, however, was sufficient to supply the additional leverage required aft; and the engines working at half speed, with the headsails flattened, the ship’s bows were presently brought up to the wind, when we lay-to under easy steam.
“Well done, my lads!” sang out the skipper from the bridge, when the ship’s head was round and the peril of her broaching-to in the heavy seaway been fortunately averted; the wind was blowing aft, of course, and bringing his voice to us as if he stood by, and shouting in our very ears, “Now look sharp and come here under the bridge; I want you to cast off the lashings of the big wheel amidships and see that the yolk lines run clear. We shall have to manhandle the helm and steer from below, as the steam gear up here in the wheel-house is hopelessly jammed and will take a month of Sundays to get right!”
“Aye, aye, sir,” we made answer, under his nose, having been scurrying forwards while he was speaking, the Irish mate adding in his native vernacular, “Begorrah, we’ll rig up the whole, sir, in the twinkling of a bedpost, sure!”
“Hullo!” exclaimed the skipper, “is that you, O’Neil?”
“Faith, all that’s lift of me, sir!”
“How’s that?—I was just going to send down to your cabin to rouse you out.”
“Begorrah, its moighty little rousin’ I want, sor! The ould barquey’s that lively that she’d wake a man who’d been d’id for a wake, sure! I’ve been so rowled about in me burth and banged agin’ the bulkheads that my bones fell loike jelly and I’m blue-mouldy all over. But what d’ye want, cap’en? Sure, I’m helping the youngster with this whale here.”
“By jingo!” cried the skipper, “you’re the right man in the right place!”
“Faith, that’s what the gaolor s’id to the burghlor, sor, when he fixed him up noicely on the treadmill!”
The skipper laughed.
“Well, you fix up your job all right, and you’ll be as good as your friend the gaoler,” he said. “When we have the helm all alaunto again, we can bear up on our course and jog along comfortably. I think we are lucky to have got off so lightly, considering the wind and sea, with this steering gear breaking down at such an awkward moment!”
“Ah, we ain’t seed the worse on it yet, and you’d better not holler till ye’re out o’ the wood!” muttered old Masters under his breath, in reply to this expression of opinion of the skipper, the boatswain having come to our assistance with all the hands he could muster, so as to get the wheel below the bridge in working order as soon as possible. “I knowed that this ghost-ship meant sumkin’ and we ain’t come to the end o’ the log yet!”
Almost as he uttered the words, Mr Fosset came up the engine-room hatchway and made his way hurriedly towards us.
“By jingo, Fosset, here you are at last!” exclaimed the skipper on seeing him. “I thought you were never coming up again, finding it so jolly warm and comfortable below! Are things all right there now, and are the bilge-pumps working?”
Captain Applegarth spoke jocosely enough, everything being pretty easy on deck and the ship breasting the gale like a duck, but Mr Fosset’s face, I noticed, looked grave and he answered the other in a more serious fashion than his general wont, his mouth working nervously in the pale moonlight that lent him a more pallid air as the words dropped from his lips, making his countenance, indeed, almost like that of a corpse.
“But what, man!” exclaimed the skipper impatiently, interrupting his slow speech before Mr Fosset could get any further. “Anything wrong, eh?”
“Yes, sir, I’m sorry to say something is very wrong, I fear—very wrong below,” replied the other sadly. “There has been a sad accident in the stoke-hole!”
Old Masters, whose ears had been wide open to the conversation, here nudged me with his elbow as I stood beside him, and at the same time giving forth a grunt of deep and heartfelt significance.
“I knowed summet ’ud happen,” he whispered in a sepulchral voice that sounded all the more gruesome from the attendant circumstances, the shrieking wind tearing through the riggings, the melancholy wash of the waves alongside, the moaning and groaning of the poor old barquey’s timbers as if she were in grievous pain, while at that very moment the bell under the break of the fo’c’s’le struck eight bells slowly, as if tolling for a passing soul. “You seed the ghost-ship, Mr Haldane, the same as me, for I saw it, that I did!”